Note: After Reading a Chaplin Book

Stephen Weissmann, M.D., offers us a new biography on Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin.

The book is fairly straightforward: it is a stringently post-Freudian reading of Chaplin’s life and work, but it brought us to this point: while creative acts can produce therapeutic balms, and while we write with great deference to speech therapy, music therapy, and all other art-based therapy, a lifetime of creativity is not a substitute for a lifetime of therapy, as the book’s dissapointingly limited exegetal strategies seem to suggest — i.e.,

“Telescoping memories of Chaplin’s failed actor parents, coupled with equally painful memories of his own experiences with ’stage death’ … were enough to provoke a massive and disruptive level of performance anxiety on the eve of his long anticipated moment of stardom …”

or:

“Charlie had witnessed his father’s descent. His screen character commemorated it symbolically.”

This is as narrow as it is misleading; the world aims at totality. “Visions of Joanna” isn’t about Joan Baez because their names are similar, nor is Charlie’s screen character his own father because he saw what he saw.

More to the point, though: comedy is not a sickness or some sort of afterbirth occasioned by a psychic wound; it is an ability. The best construct their words with an almost geometric precision. Compare Johnny Carson and Justice Leibowitz in David Frost’s The Americans.

Carson: … I had a very brilliant young biologist on the show by the name of Paul Erlich. He brought up this point that if you don’t limit the population somewhere along the line, inevitably it will become an unbearable situation of just too many people.
Frost: But everybody says that your show, by keeping everybody up, is contributing to that.
Carson: We have a lot of commercials, David.

…
(When asked if he’s ever broken the law.)

Leibowitz: … I guess there isn’t a person in the world that hasn’t broken the law. I suppose traffic laws, something of that kind. But what law are you talking about?
Frost: I just wondered. Speeding, perhaps?
Leibowitz: Speeding or parking. Gosh, how much do you have to pay to park your car here in this neighborhood? About three bucks for a couple of hours? Pretty expensive, isn’t it?
(Laughter.)

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And the process? It is a process of reinvention as detailed as any moment can be and as wide as history — an extraordinary sloughing off of anything vaguely dusty and a blast of life to the calcified. It is that hurricane of joy that is almost impossible to stop once it starts. It’s about the act of paying attention. It’s the “Why?” and “Why not?” and “What if?” turning over some Rubik’s Cube-like situation.

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Because here’s the thing: a minefield part of it is based on pre-conditioning, and pre-conditioning and misconceptions aren’t necessarily a bad thing; most are opportunities in disguise, but it is something to correct, an arrow pointing in a different direction. If a comedian is introduced as just starting out, even when he’s not, it sets a baseline of expectation; if a comedian is introduced with a post-Freudian frame, the durability of the reader’s ego/counter-voice comes into play. If it’s a strong one, then they can rightfully say it was just another piece of the puzzle and move onto other parts; if it isn’t, then it sets up some sort of disappointment.

One of the tenets of modern comedy is, arguably, “Yes, and –.” It accepts everything and builds. It would have been nice to see that willingness to continually turn itself on its head play out in the book, too.

Perhaps the first thing we’d like to see tackled whenever Chaplin comes up again is Truffaut’s comment — perhaps one of the more astonishing ones we’ve read — which runs as follows:

“Without willing it or knowing it, Chaplin helped men live; later, when he became aware of it, would it not have been criminal to stop trying to help them even more?”

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